The colonel gave us a superb breakfast and it was plainly observable that his reputation as a gastronome had not been overrated. Ham, fish, jellies, butter, creams, cakes—all the profusion of an Indian breakfast—were severally the very best of their kinds; moreover, Colonel Bluff gave the history of every article, telling us to lay on, and spare not, as we should not meet with any like them between that and Mr. Havell’s, the provisioner’s, at Dinapore.
The dinner was equally remarkable for its goodness and profusion; Chittagong fowls, as big as turkeys, were there, and a saddle of mutton cased with two inches of fat, on which the colonel gazed with as much pride as some tender parent would look on a favourite child.
He had invited some eight or ten of the ladies and gentlemen of the station to meet us, and it was soon abundantly clear that the captain had drawn a most accurate sketch of his friend’s character.
After the former had retired, he began to let out a little more of it. Seated at the head of his table—his burly King Hal person filling his capacious arm-chair—figure a little obliqued, a napkin over his knee, and the bottles in array before him, the jolly colonel looked the very personification of absolutism and animalism.
“Gentlemen, fill your glasses! Church and King! and after that what you will. Pass the bottle, Belfield; fill up a bumper; come, a brimmer; no daylight, sir; none of your Whiggery here; I thought you had left all that off?”
“I’ll drink anything you please, colonel; but I fear our politics are wider apart than ever.”
“You’re not becoming a follower of that rascal Tom Paine, are you? I know you used to dabble in all sorts of books, and were but a few degrees off it—a republican, irreligious scoundrel—gone to the d——l, I hope, as he deserves—a fellow that had no respect for royalty, and would have upset, if he could, our holy religion, an infernal villain!”
“Why, you are warm, colonel,” observed a middle-aged officer; “may I ask when you took so keenly to politics?”
“Yes, you may ask,” said Bluff; “but it depends upon me whether I answer you—haw! haw! Come, fill your glass and pass the bottle, and don’t ask questions—haw! haw! haw!”
Never did I see so rough a specimen of humanity. How he talked, laughed, thumped the table, and laid down the law, in the exercise of his unenviable immunity!